Slave Revolts in Antiquity
Slave Revolts in Antiquity
Theresa Urbainczyk
To the memory of Pauline Watkins
First published in 2008 by Acumen
Published 2014 by Routledge
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© Theresa Urbainczyk, 2008
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Contents
Acknowledgements
Chronology
The ancient Mediterranean
1
The significance of slave revolts
2
Preparing for revolt
3
Maintaining resistance
4
The role of the leader
5
The ideology of the slaves
6
Sympathy for the slaves: Diodorus Siculus
7
The secret of the success of the Spartan helots
8
Slave revolts in the ancient historiography
Notes
Bibliography
Index
Acknowledgements
I thought a book about slave revolts in antiquity was a great project. I came up with it in 2000 and over the past eight years more colleagues than I care to remember have tried to dissuade me from it. The process of writing and rewriting has been at times extremely dispiriting but I still think the subject deserves several books and am more than happy to have finished this. Consequently, my thanks to those individuals who have encouraged me are more than usually heartfelt. First I must acknowledge with gratitude that University College Dublin allowed me to take two semesters of sabbatical leave, the first spent in Berlin in 2004, the second in Warsaw in 2007. Giving papers in the Free University and the Humboldt University made me rethink my ideas several times and I owe much to the audiences in both places. I am grateful to the Royal Irish Academy and the Polish Academy of Sciences for the grant that enabled me to go to Warsaw for the first time.
Two conferences helped sustain me: one in Galway (“Slave Systems, Ancient and Modern”, organized by Enrico del Lago and Constantina Katsari in November 2004); the other in Hull (“Slavery, Unfinished Business”, organized by the Wilberforce Institute for the Study of Slavery and Emancipation in May 2007). I would like especially to thank Kevin Bales, Keith Bradley, Douglas Egerton, Vernita Irvin, Constantina Katsari and Orlando Patterson. Their comments on my talks were more helpful than they will ever know.
This book is much better because of the observations of the anonymous readers, and my copy-editor, Kate Williams, for Acumen, and I acknowledge gratefully their contribution to the finished product. Jan Willem Drijvers and Stephen Mennell both read full drafts of this book and were kind enough to tell me to carry on with it. I owe a special debt to Wilfried Nippel, who commented on a late draft very carefully and saved me from many errors. Niall McKeown also read this, and his challenging remarks improved it substantially. Stelios Mallikourtis taught me much about ancient and modern Greece and took an interest in my work when it seemed no one else did. Kieran Allen, Roland Erne and Ireneusz Łada have all, at times, persuaded me to finish this, if only because they did not want to hear about it any more. I shall always be grateful to them whatever their motives. Steven Gerrard saw the possibilities of this book and I am happy that he did. I dedicate this to my mother, who would have thought a book about slave revolts in antiquity was a great project.
Chronology
BCE
Unknown date
Slaves rebel on Samos for six years. After their masters are unable to conquer them, they agree a truce and allow them to leave. The slaves board a ship and go to live in Ephesus.
Unknown date
After their masters are away on a long campaign, slaves in Scythia take their place; they marry their masters’ wives and have children by them.
501
Slave revolt in Rome.
490
Battle of Marathon. Athenians and Plataeans defeat the Persians.
480
Battles of Thermopylae and Salamis; end of Persian invasion of Greece.
464
Taking advantage of an earthquake in Sparta, some helots rebel, and occupy Mount Ithome. After ten years the Spartans still cannot defeat them, so they are allowed to leave the Peloponnese and settle in Naupactus on the Corinthian gulf.
460
Slave revolt in Rome, led by Herdonius the Sabine.
431–404
Peloponnesian War, the war between Athens and Sparta and their respective allies.
Late-5th century
Herodotus is writing his Histories.
Threat of helot revolt affects Spartan policy during the Peloponnesian War.
425
Athenians land in Pylos on the Pelopponese, hoping to gain the help of the local helots. They score an important victory.
419
Slave revolt in Rome.
Unspecified date
Spartans kill 2,000 helots in an attempt to gain control.
415–413
Slaves desert in Sicily as the Athenians start to lose ground there.
413
20,000 slaves desert from Athens taking advantage of the Spartan occupation of Decelea in Attica.
404
Defeat of Athens. Thucydides is writing The History of the Peloponnesian War.
Early-4th century
Xenophon is composing Hellenica.
397
Cinadon leads a conspiracy of helots and others against the Spartans.
3rd century
A group of rebel slaves survives in Chios with the leadership of Drimakos, and later without it.
275
The Romans conquer southern Italy.
264–241
First Punic (Carthaginian) War.
259
Slave revolt in Rome.
218–201
Second Punic War.
217
Slave revolt in Rome.
216
Battle of Cannae, victory for Hannibal.
202
Defeat of Hannibal’s army at Zama.
198
Slave revolt in Setia in Italy.
197
> End of Second Macedonian War. The Romans defeat the army of Philip V of Macedon. Roman territory in Spain is formally constituted into the provinces or Nearer Spain and Further Spain.
196
Slave revolt in Etruria.
192–188
Syrian War. Antiochus III surrenders territory in Europe and Asia Minor to the Romans.
191
Rome completes its conquest of Cisalpine Gaul.
186
Bacchanalian conspiracy involving slaves in Rome and southern Italy.
185
Slave uprising in the region of Tarentum.
184
Slave uprisings in southern Italy.
171–168
Third Macedonian War.
149–146
Third Punic War.
146
Physical destruction of Carthage and Corinth by the Romans. Macedonia becomes a Roman province.
141
First slave war starts on Sicily.
133
Tribunate of Tiberius Gracchus, who attempts to introduce reforms to remedy the dangerous situation of too many slaves and not enough free people on the land, with a proposal to destribute public land. He and many of his supporters are murdered. King Attalus leaves Pergamum to the Romans in his will. Aristonicus and a following of slaves revolt in Pergamum.
132
End of the first Sicilian slave war.
129
Annexation of the Roman province of Asia.
125
Fulvius Flaccus proposes Roman citizenship for Latins.
123
Tribunate of Gaius Gracchus, brother of Tiberius. One of Gaius’ reforms is to allow equites to sit as jurors.
121
Murder of Gaius Gracchus.
107
Marius enlists landless men to the Roman army.
104
Decree from Senate to release free citizens of allied states who had been enslaved.
104–100
Second slave war on Sicily.
91–88
War between Rome and Italian allies, called Social War.
89–85
First Mithridatic War, against Mithridates (also spelled Mithradates) VI Eupator Dionysus, king of Pontus.
88
Roman general Sulla marches on Rome.
87–86
Roman general Marius marches on Rome.
83–31
Second Mithridatic War.
81
Sulla appointed dictator.
77
Pompey is sent to Spain against Sertorius.
74–64
Third Mithridatic War.
73–71
Slave war in Italy. The slave army is led by Spartacus.
71
Defeat by Pompey of army led by Sertorius.
71
Defeat of slave army by Crassus and Pompey.
71
Pompey allowed to stand as consul, although not qualified to do so.
70
Crassus and Pompey are consuls.
67
Pompey receives command against pirates in the Mediterranean.
63
Conspiracy of Catiline. There are fears that the slaves will join in.
60
Remnants of Spartacus’ army are still at large in southern Italy.
49–45
Civil war in Rome.
44
Julius Caesar is murdered.
43–31
Civil war in Rome.
Mid-1st century
Diodorus in composing history.
31
Battle of Actium. Octavian defeats Mark Anthony.
30
Egypt is annexed.
27
Octavian receives the title Augustus. During the reign of Augustus, Livy is composing his history.
CE
14
Death of Emperor Augustus. Strabo is composing his Geography.
21
Gladiators join Sacrovir’s rebellion.
24
A slave war headed by Titus Curtisius is averted.
61
Gladiators break out of their school at Praeneste. There is talk of another Spartacus.
Late-1st century
Plutarch is composing his parallel lives.
1st–2nd century
Cassius Dio is writing his history.
Early-2nd century
Florus is compiling his eiptome of Livy’s history of Rome.
2nd century
Appian is composing his Roman history.
2nd–3rd century
Athenaeus is composing The Deipnosophistae.
Early-3rd century
In Italy a group of slaves and others led by Bulla successfully evades capture until betrayal of Bulla to the authorities.
Early-5th century
Augustine is composing his City of God. Orosius is composing his History against the Pagans.
The ancient Mediterranean
1
The significance of slave revolts
Slaves rebelled in various ways in the ancient world. Sometimes, when they had the opportunity, they ran away. Sometimes they took up arms and fought their masters. Spartacus is a name familiar to many but he was only one of tens of thousands of slaves from antiquity who formed armies to fight for their freedom. We do not have as much information as we should like about these events from the ancient world, but there is more than might be assumed from a quick glance at modern histories.1 One of the aims of this book is to remind readers that slaves did rebel in antiquity; another is to discover why the material that remains has been, to a large extent, ignored or dismissed as historically insignificant. One might reasonably suppose that this attitude simply reflects the ancient texts, and yet one of the results of this re-examination has been the gradual realization that ancient sources accorded far more importance to the actions of the slaves than have modern writers.
While one might expect modern commentators to be more sympathetic toward slaves than their ancient counterparts, the reason for a relative lack of interest in slave rebellion is perhaps not hard to find: slave armies might defeat those of their former masters for a while, even for years, but in the end slavery persisted.2 There was no abolitionist movement among free people, nor even any text calling for the abolition of slavery. We do not even know that the slaves themselves wanted an end to slavery for other people. It is more likely that, on acquiring their own freedom, they would simply have gone on to become slave-owners themselves. Slaves who took up arms against their masters were simply groups of individuals taking rash, if not downright foolish, action, which could never have succeeded.3 At the time, it must have seemed threatening to the owners to find their slaves armed and hostile, but with hindsight we can see that such groupings never had a chance of long-term success. And, it might be argued, they had no impact, or only a minimal one, on their own societies.
There are several reasons, however, why it is worth examining slave revolts from antiquity more closely. There is a failure to understand those texts from antiquity that do contain material about revolts if one dismisses the terror they reveal, and indeed it is terror, of rebellious slaves. We also fail to comprehend the true impact that such rebellions had on society at large if we take the view that they were doomed to failure before they even started. The crucifixion of 6,000 slaves along the Appian Way after the defeat of the army led by Spartacus did indeed hold up a gruesome illustration to other slaves of what would happen to them if they so much as had a rebellious thought, but at the same time it was the action of a society that had been terrified by recent events.
A study of slave revolts can thus give rise to a deeper understanding of the ancient societies in which they occurred; it also belongs to the history of slavery. The slaves of antiquity may not have abolished slavery or even wanted to, but their actions, and a history of their actions, is important for slaves of later ages. It is evidence that slaves rebelled, a
nd have always rebelled, against an institution now regarded as unacceptable in a civilized society. Toussaint Louverture was called the black Spartacus, not because he was doomed to failure, but because he had dared to rebel.
At this point, it is worth noting issues raised by Niall McKeown in his provocative work The Invention of Slavery?,4 in which he looks at the works of well-known scholars of ancient slavery and reveals, with a careful precision, the emotional as well as the political attitudes behind their approaches. At the end of his first chapter he comments:
The problem is not so much that we invent the past as that, when we explore it, we tend to find what we are looking for. Often, when we appear to claim that “this is the way it actually was” we are, in practice, asking the reader to share our ethical ideals, which is something very different.5
No historian is free from bias, but it seems that it is more difficult than usual for a detached attitude to be maintained when discussing slave revolts, ancient or modern.6 Moses Finley comments7 that ever since Marx and Engels wrote in the Communist Manifesto (1848) that all history was the history of class struggle, ancient slavery has been a battleground for Marxists and non-Marxists.8 This is certainly true of the scholarship on slave revolts, the very essence, one might think, of ancient class struggle for Marxists.9 In the title of his study of slave revolt in the southern states of the US, From Rebellion to Revolution, Eugene Genovese used terms that are key in this debate. His argument is that the particular historical circumstances of, for instance, the rebellion in St Domingue, meant that, unlike their ancient counterparts, these slaves were revolutionary and had revolutionary aims.10 Until this age of revolution, when ideas about freedom and equality were formulated, slaves merely wished to withdraw from society, not change it.11 In his Introduction Genovese writes: “The history of slavery and of slave revolts in the Americas corresponds roughly to the transition from seigneurialism to capitalism”.12
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